


Copenhagen Revisited

by ForASecondThereWedWon



Series: Oh my god, they were checkmates... [11]
Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: Banter, Benny Watts being Benny Watts, Established Relationship, F/M, Living Together, Minor Off-Screen Violence, Post-Canon, Sober Beth Harmon, Travel, new headcanon: Benny hates planes, rated for sexual content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:20:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28030797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForASecondThereWedWon/pseuds/ForASecondThereWedWon
Summary: Two years after Beth beat Borgov, it's Benny's turn to face him. They make Cleo's West Berlin apartment their headquarters as Beth prepares Benny for the match.
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Series: Oh my god, they were checkmates... [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2020483
Comments: 38
Kudos: 339





	Copenhagen Revisited

**Author's Note:**

> _We might even leave the USA/'Cause I gotta brand new game I wanna play_ \- Canned Heat
> 
> Here's the result of a fic request for Beth and Benny being Beth and Benny as he gets ready to face Borgov!

Benny travels like Van Helsing—staring out the window of the plane with an expression of feverish determination. The fact that he’s compared Borgov to Dracula more than once may be what’s leading Beth to her own character association. Mostly, she’s just watching him and wishing he’d taken the aisle seat. He’s blocking the view.

“I can practically feel him breathing down my neck,” he complains, shifting in his seat and drawing his jacket closed protectively across his chest.

Beth rolls her eyes and sips their Coke through her straw.

“He’s never even beaten you that badly,” she remarks, passing the drink to Benny, who sucks absently at his own straw.

“But he could.”

She scoffs.

“ _How_? You’re better than you were the last time you played him.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because,” she says firmly, “you’ve played me a couple hundred times since then. Borgov’s not as tough to beat as I am. I proved that in Moscow two years ago.”

“Oh, did you? I hadn’t heard.”

Narrowing her eyes at him for his snark, she takes the Coke back and sets it on her lowered tray.

“You weren’t this nervous in New York.”

“We weren’t flying towards him in New York.” Benny tugs his jacket again. “And I’m not nervous.”

“Right. Well,” Beth reminds him, “you’ll have time to acclimate. That’s why we’re going early. And it’s not like Borgov’s going to be nearby. I don’t think being a celebrated chess player is enough to balance out his nationality in the eyes of West Berlin. Not exactly warm feelings towards Russians.”

“Is this a good idea?”

She looks at him carefully. He doesn’t usually ask her questions unless they’re rhetorical, teasing, or both.

“Yes,” she says decisively. “It was a good idea for Cleo to offer her apartment and it’s a good idea to go early. When we fly to Copenhagen in three weeks, you’ll be ready to give Borgov the same treatment you gave Najdorf.”

“You know journalists still ask me about that game?” Benny says, finally swiveling his face away from the window to meet her eye. “I was eight. I don’t even remember it. All I ever say about it is something I remember saying before. It’s just me quoting me quoting me—” He makes a rolling gesturing with his hand. “—all the way back to something I can only assume is the truth.”

Beth makes a dismissive noise.

“They print what they want anyway.”

“It’s lousy.”

“What is?”

“Feeling like a pawn. Can never move backward,” he mumbles.

“I’ve never chaperoned you to a tournament before,” she observes. “I didn’t realize the anticipation would make you so dramatic.”

“I’m not—”

“You are. Maybe you’re not irreversibly out of touch with your eight-year-old self.”

He stares sulkily out the window.

“I get airsick,” he finally admits in a low voice.

“ _That’s_ what’s wrong?” Beth laughs. “No wonder you drive to all the domestic opens.” Taking pity, she passes him the Coke again. “Here, the carbonation will help.”

Benny drinks, then rests his head back against the seat with a sigh, closing his eyes.

“Vampire bastard,” he groans.

Beth holds the bottle for a minute, then places her cold hand against his forehead.

“It’s his slicked-back hair, isn’t it?” she guesses.

“Could be.”

* * *

Cleo isn’t at her Berlin apartment. She’s not in Berlin. She was planning to be, when she volunteered her place as Benny’s training ground, so Beth and Benny are doubly stupefied to hear that she left three days earlier for a job in Milan. Cleo’s neighbour tells them this—another model, Beth would guess, based on her arty haircut and the smudge of hazy blue eyeshadow around glazed eyes. She’s higher than they were when they flew over the Atlantic, but thankfully functional enough to press Cleo’s key into Benny’s hand. Her stoned, accented English stomps the ear like a heavy tread, then grinds the words like a cigarette beneath a boot heel. She also invites them to a party at her apartment later. They don’t make it; jetlag strikes and they collapse on Cleo’s bed, dragging the scrappy, colourful assortment of decorative shawls serving as blankets over themselves and falling asleep.

Unlike when Benny trained Beth in his underground apartment in New York, they can’t count on ’round the clock silence here. It’s a loud building, boisterous and bohemian, and the parties of Cleo’s neighbour seem to occur nightly. Beth confronts a startlingly hungover teenage girl tottering up the stairs one morning as she’s going down. She jumps. The girl is a reflection. The girl is a ghost. The girl is possibly swearing at Beth for staring, judging by the scowl accompanying the words that come grating from her dry throat.

Fortunately, nightly parties also mean that the place is quiet most of the day as people sleep off whatever they drank, smoked, injected, or otherwise ingested the previous evening. Quiet is good. Quiet is perfect. She and Benny take slugs of strong German coffee (Benny is especially pleased, though he only hums softly to show it) and play match after match until noon at the small table under Cleo’s kitchen window. With the window propped open, they listen to the rush of traffic below. Beth breathes deeply and watches Benny chew his lip as he contemplates his moves. Their focus is the endgame—Borgov’s specialty.

When she promises they won’t get up to anything like the neighbours next door, Beth’s able to coax Benny out some evenings. They take in the culture; she does it for the memory of Alma and suspects that Benny does it for her.

She scrunches her eyebrows together in confusion as they prepare to depart on a Friday and he’s not wearing his hat.

“You’re not forgetting your head,” she says carefully, “but it’s almost as serious.”

“I don’t want it getting in the way.”

Beth stares at him, waiting for clarification.

“Come on, kid. I’m taking you dancing.”

An hour later, in his arms, she says, “As your trainer, it should’ve been _me_ forcing _you_ to take a break.”

“Ah, it might not be your tournament, but you’re just as intense. You love to study.”

“Maybe I would’ve studied less if I knew that _you_ knew how to dance.”

“Yeah, I’m sensational. Just don’t look at my feet.”

They laugh their way through it and, though she can’t actually hear them laughing over the volume of the band at the hole in the wall Benny dragged her into, she’ll recall the way his eyes squinted and his teeth showed and fill in the laughter after the fact. Their hands clasp and release and their fingers misalign in a haphazard grip and she _laughs_. She sways against him, clutching his half-unbuttoned black shirt, and feels his shudder. They hurry back to Cleo’s apartment and have sweaty, desperate sex against the wall just inside the door. Beth rakes her fingers through Benny’s uncovered hair, gasping. When they’re done, they receive a muffled cheer from the neighbouring apartment. She drops her forehead to his shoulder with a smile.

The time flies and, at Benny’s behest, their play becomes more disciplined. They only replicate Russian matches to reenforce the coldblooded style he’ll meet when he sits down across from Borgov. They begin to use a clock; up to this point, their exchanges were untimed, to allow for contemplation and debate following each move, if necessary. They even—finally—get fed up with the neighbours. Benny walks out of the apartment for fresh air and comes back with a bloody nose and reddened knuckles that are beginning to swell because, apparently, some hazy partygoer staggered into him in the hallway and they got into it for no good reason. Thank god he didn’t pull his knife. Beth’s witnessed enough nasty little fistfights behind Mrs. Deardorff’s back at the orphanage to assess that Benny’s nose isn’t broken, though the skin under his left eye very quickly begins to purple. Great. He’ll face Borgov looking like a pugilist. She prepares him a nice bundle of ice and _accidentally_ drops it onto his hand to communicate her contempt for his stupidity. Reckless asshole.

“You could’ve at least _told_ me you were really going out to pick a fight.”

“What would you have done?” Benny wonders, shifting the ice from his knuckles to his face with a wince. “Taken a couple swings yourself?”

Beth puffs up, straightening her spine.

“Of course.”

“Nah, honey, your nose is too pretty to chance it.”

She can’t decide: it’s either the endearment she doesn’t know what to do with or the implication that she’d be witless enough to stand there and take a jab to the center of her face that makes Beth rise and kick the leg of the chair Benny’s sitting right on the edge of. He looks mad enough when his backside hits the floor, but he sighs and glances up at her.

“You want a game?”

She smiles.

“I’ll play black.”

The night before they fly to Copenhagen, she sees it’ll take more than fresh air, yet another chess match, or a bop on the nose to calm him. He’s pacing, pointing, and lecturing—each habit sufficiently annoying on its own, but in conjunction? He’ll drive them both crazy if she lets him carry on.

“Come on, kid,” she says, and makes him sit on the edge of the bed instead of the chair.

Beth’s efficient at undoing buttons, even from behind, and has her back-buttoning blouse stripped off before Benny’s redirected his thoughts from the game they left set up on the board in the other room to what’s happening in front of him. When she starts unzipping her skirt, he catches her hands and takes over. She sits on his lap and rubs him through his jeans until he rolls her onto her back. Breathless and fumbling at his belt, Beth tells herself Cleo had to know they wouldn’t just be using her apartment to play chess. If there’s one language Cleo speaks more fluently than the others, it’s sex. Feeling absolved, Beth hooks her legs up around Benny’s hips.

* * *

“Well, well, well, look who’s still famous,” he mutters to her after jerking open the door of the venue to the sudden flutter of flashbulbs.

“I’m sorry,” Beth offers with a smirk. “I wore sunglasses and everything. I was trying to be inconspicuous.”

Benny grins back because that was never going to happen. She hasn’t exactly kept her head down for the last two years, steadily working her way through American Masters, felling them. It’s kind of a hobby. Still, she’s chosen an active chess career in the States over the spectacle of European tournaments, so for the international press, Beth’s appearance today is quite an occasion. But it doesn’t trouble Benny. He’s never struggled with monopolizing the spotlight.

“I’ll answer five questions before my first match,” he announces, arm around Beth’s waist. “Who’s first?”

“Mr. Watts, what’s it like to be back in Copenhagen?”

“Great. It’s been a while. The flight was quick with no turbulence, exactly how I like it.”

“Your eye—have you been in a fight?”

“Chess is a rough sport.”

“How are you feeling going into your first match?”

“Prepared.”

“Do you plan to meet Borgov in the final on Saturday?”

“Wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

“What is your relationship with Miss Harmon?”

Benny glances sideways at her. Above her sunglasses, Beth raises an eyebrow. Some people might be thrown by the abrupt switch in subject matter, but the moment of hesitation as he parts his lips to answer is mischievous.

“Waiting for her to make an honest man outta me. That’s five, boys,” he points out, lifting a hand that does double duty as an acknowledgement and a brushing aside motion; it parts the small crowd and he guides Beth through.

“Well now they _definitely_ won’t print anything about you.”

“Sure they will. My name right alongside yours: ‘Watts and Harmon.’ Maybe ‘Harmon and Watts’—sounds a little better. Anyway, they’ve got enough to suggest that we’ve been working together and that’s the edge that’ll get to Borgov.”

“If he picks up a paper between tomorrow and Saturday,” Beth clarifies.

“He will. Or somebody’ll do it for him. One of his KGB babysitters, probably. They seem like they’d be gossips. But Borgov’ll hear about it and the mention of your name will put the fear of god into him.”

“Oh, it will, will it?”

“No question.” He halts and looks at her seriously. “You mind if we find someplace quiet to sit down for a minute?”

She checks her watch, the cracked glass face long ago replaced.

“Yeah, you’ve got a few minutes, but wouldn’t you prefer to go in and, how did you put it? Breathe down the neck of your competitors?”

“Cute, but I’m a little worried I’d be _sick_ down the neck of my competitors.” He squeezes his eyes shut momentarily. “Ugh, that plane ride.”

“But there wasn’t any turbulence!”

“Beth, please. Don’t even say the word.”

He plays two games that day, with enough turnaround time in between that they go for a walk and she takes a few non-press photographs of him in front of attractive backdrops. Behaving like real tourists seems to distract him. Benny even allows Beth to charm him into surrendering the end of his sandwich so she can use the bread to feed the little birds in a park they walk through.

The following day, the schedule tightens up. Lesser players are vanquished and Benny is presented with more people to beat, each one smug from their recent win until Benny shuffles things around on the board with exchanges so swiftly conceived and executed that it might be sleight of hand, one complex magic trick until—ta da!—he’s hemmed their king. He’s fucking brilliant, Beth thinks as she observes him, occasionally shaking her head in amazement. Her pulses races each time he sits down across from someone with a look on his face like, _I hope you’ve made peace with your god_. They screened too many movies of a biblical bent at Methuen. Prayer and faith certainly never lifted her high, but watching Benny does.

The next day is the second to last and Benny plays once, in the morning, with adjournments and the deciding of third and fourth place of the tournament in the afternoon. Winning his game isn’t anything special to him; he was always looking ahead, intending to square off against Borgov. In Benny’s style, Beth considers, it’d be a gunslinger draw at high noon. In Borgov’s (via Benny’s perception of him), Van Helsing advancing on a crypt with a garland of garlic bulbs and a raised crucifix.

She sits patiently with him in their hotel room. Unlike the night before they departed from Germany, he isn’t stressed. He’s calm. Beth asks if he’d rather stretch his legs, go find some of his friends that played at this tournament (and lost) and talk to them, work the room in a way that simultaneously captivates her and makes her roll her eyes. No. He prefers to stay with her. They sprawl on the bed and play out a couple of his slickest games, then the last twenty moves of the ‘68 Moscow final: Borgov v. Harmon.

“Let’s go to sleep,” he says softly, when she’s dozing with her head on her arm. He’s been staring at the board in silence for a long time.

“Are you sure?” Beth yawns before continuing, “I could order up some coffee?”

Benny’s already gathering the pieces and folding the board.

“You can’t do any more for me than you’ve done, and I can’t learn any more tonight than I have.”

“You’re prepared,” she agrees. That might not be quite what he meant, but she figures even Benny Watts needs a little reassurance.

“For most things he could do.”

Beth pulls her pajamas out from under the pillow on her side of the bed.

“You know how he plays. It’s clean. You just have to keep your eyes open. Borgov isn’t the sort of player to pull something creative out of nowhere.”

“You say that, but once, I had an opponent threaten to kick me in the crotch.”

“Mm, well, that’s not Borgov. Like I said, no creativity.” She watches for a minute as Benny strips his shirt off and flings it onto the chair. “By the way, it wasn’t a threat, it was posed as a question—rhetorical, even philosophical—and only because that opponent felt she wasn’t being taken seriously.”

Benny smiles and walks around the end of the bed. He cradles the back of her head and gives her a slow kiss.

“Will you kick Borgov in the crotch for me if I lose?”

“Now you want me to fight your battles for you? Where was this attitude in Berlin?” She grabs Benny’s butt as he walks back to trade his jeans for pajamas. He turns to look at her inquiringly. “I won’t have to.”

He spends all the next morning proving her right, not succumbing to how Borgov’s pieces shoulder their way across the board. They knock Benny’s aside some, but he hangs in and they adjourn in the afternoon for an after-dinner resumption. Though the reprieve is nearly three hours, they don’t go back to their room. There’s no international call to wait for—every bit of encouragement from their friends was given before they left New York. Benny has a drink with dinner and when that doesn’t loosen him up enough, Beth gets a little fresh under the table as she’s adjusting the napkin in his lap, just until she’s sure he’s in a new mindset.

At seven o’clock, the jacket, the hat, and the man are back in position opposite Borgov. Benny makes the move he sealed earlier, then leans forward by his shoulders. In that gesture, Beth knows Benny’s got him. He confirms it sixteen moves later and Borgov concedes the match in a gracious bow of his head. Benny dawdled a little, not dropping the guillotine blade the way she did with her swift Ohio victory over him, but he’s a different player. An admirer of historic matches, a showman with quick fingers and no better place to be than in front of a chessboard. That’s what she’s always guessed his mentality to be. Where she loves to win, he loves to play.

He rises from the table to a roomful of applause. His eyes find hers and she whistles with her fingers in her mouth, the way he taught her one night in his apartment. The sound is shrill enough over the rest of the noise that the photographer beside her turns to glare and tell her to shut the hell up. He begins to apologize when he recognizes her, but Beth shakes her head impatiently and points past him.

“Don’t look at me,” she says. “Look at him.”


End file.
